www.website.com vs. website.com : backlinks, PRs & numbers of pages are different

How can it be, and how everything can be optimized?

 

It isn't uncommon for relatively new sites -- some of your backlinks are in one form and some in the other. Eventually, Google and other search engines will recognize the two as the same domain but in the meantime it is treating them as if they were separate sites.

1. Make sure that all of your own INTERNAL links are consistent -- in most cases, it is best to use the www form because that's what people expect and because backlinks are most likely to be in that form unless you specifiy othewise.

2. Contact as many of your external backlinks as you can and ask the site owner/webmaster to change the link to the www form

3. Wait and be patient -- as I said, Google will eventually figure it out.

 

Yes, it is just a matter of time, same thing happened to one of my sites, but Google picked it up and everything is normal now.

 

Thanks for the explanations!!!

"it is a matter of time"? I have been observing it for more than 2 months.

 

That's true, of course... I assumed from the question in the initial post that this wasn't the case but rather just a matter of inconsistent linking.

 

I agree 100% with Shawn. Google isn't always quick to pick up on that. My site is over 6 years old and for as long as I can remember "G" had different PR for the www version and non www version even though both were exactly the same. I had problems using a redirect or rewrite because I used MS front page and the redirect seemed to screw up the extensions. It was actually only this morning that got around to adding the 301 redirect to my htaccess file with the help of Eric Walker over in the " Your Google PageRank" thread. I checked it and it seems to work great. Hopefully Google, Yahoo and all the rest will realize their the same now. And if they combine both sets of links (I hope) the backlinks will more then double.

 

Did you do this? Most of the time that I have seen examples of Google not recognizing the sites as the same it is because even internal links are inconsistent, and you still should try to ensure as much consistency as possible in external links.

 

I tried contacting as many as possible. Without much success. The site has been up for so long that we had quite a few natural links pointing not only to the non www url but also using the site name instead of anchor text. On top of that quite a few from foreign countries where I don't speak the language. Hey....I'm an American...I have a hard time speaking one language. It just turned out to be a real pain. Using the re-direct was by far the easiest. Even thiough it won't help the anchor text situation it should eventually fix www/non-www situation.

 

Speaking of internal links, I do have a mix of link types in the site. All on the main pages are absolute ie: http://www.mysite.com/directory/page.htm but on some of the internal pages I just used relative links ie: ../../page.htm. Browsers seem to do just fine with relative links and so do spider simulators but do you think SE's would perfer that every link was absolute?

 

No... the relative links aren't a problem. It's only a problem if you mix http://mysite.com in with http://www.mysite.com

 

also having different anchor text isn't a problem either, nor is using just "mysite.com" as anchor text, as long as the URLs are consistent

 

It would be nice though if the anchor text was keyword based rather then site name. Unless keywords in anchor text isn't as important any longer. Personally I wish the SE's would put more importance on content rather then backlinks. But I doubt that will happen in my lifetime.

 

The emphasis on keywords stemmed from the SE's trying to reward site on the basis of sontent. The better and more abundant the content the more often certain terms would arise. The problem is that this apsect of the algo is too simplistic and everyone has long since gotten wise to it.

 

Everyone gets wise to everything eventually, especially SEO's. Personally I liked it better when good valuable content and natural themed links was king and got you decent placement in the serps. Without any stuffing meta's with keywords, repetition of keywords, stufing comments, hidden text, hidden links or any other underhanded tactics. You could spend your time developing your site and making it better rather then wasting so many hours trying to move up 10 spots. OK, rant time is over. Time to get back to trying to move up a spot or two.

 

lol

I agree with you 100%. Something definately got lost somewhere along the way.

 

... like the point.